Tom Burke’s Blog

There’s an interesting series of posts on Cruise Critic from someone who’s on the maiden voyage and is blogging from it. On day 7 the writer had this to say, on the very topic that I’ve been writing about:

“I have asked a number of fellow passengers, folk conversant in the ways of ships, if there was anything about the Queen Victoria that made it particularly a Cunard ship and not a ship of some other line. They all thought it a good question, but not one of them could point to anything that marked this vessel as a Cunard vessel and not, say, a Princess one or a Holland America one…… What makes a Cunard vessel particularly Cunard is the staff, the persons who learn and carry on the traditions of the company. On my last few sailings on Cunard vessels, I have been seated at officers’ tables, the hosts of which had spent their entire careers with P&O/Princess. That is another wonderful seagoing tradition, but it is not Cunard.”

Interesting comments, I thought.

Here’s the link to the whole blog.

It all gets better from here…. it can still get colder, of course – I think that in many places in the northern hemisphere late January is generally colder than late December – but at least from now on the days are getting lighter, and tells me that winter will end.

Not that we see much sun here in winter, even on good days. I live in Sheffield, in the county of South Yorkshire in England, at a latitude of approximately 53 degrees and maybe 20 minutes north. What this means is that on the winter solstice sunrise is at 8:22 and sunset at 15:46 – that’s just under seven and a half hours of daylight. And the sun only rises between 14 and 15 degrees above the horizon today. (See below for the formula to work out how high the sun rises where you live on both of the solstices!) So not much sunshine.

But at least today we’ve got some sunshine. For the last several days it has just been grey and cold, and you wouldn’t really say that it got light at all. But today is bright and sunny for the first time for a week or more, and I think everybody enjoys that.

That formula? – it’s 90 minus your latitude, then for the summer solstice add 22.5, while for the winter solstice subtract 22.5. So today, for me here in Sheffield, the sum is:

(90 – 53.3) – 22.5 = 14.2

The answer is in degrees above the horizon. That’s in the northern hemisphere, of course – in the southern hemisphere the signs for the 22.5 adjustment (which is the angle of the earth’s inclination) should be reversed.

Not, not the actual monarch – I’ll leave that to David Starkey. I’m talking about Cunard’s new ship “Queen Victoria”. She arrived in Southampton on Friday and was christened by the Duchess of Cornwall yesterday.

I did a post a few months ago about her, or specifically whether or not a ship that has near-identical sisters in four other lines can be representative of the traditions of the company she’s actually sailing for. At that time I probably tended towards the opposing view, but I’ve changed my opinion now: even though the ships may be very similar, as long as the differences inherent in the lines themselves are implemented on board, then whichever ship you’re talking about is a true ‘whatever’ ship. In other words it’s perfectly possible for two quite similar ships, e.g. Carnival Spirit and Queen Victoria, to be a representative Carnival ‘fun ship’ and a classic Cunarder. It depends, I suppose, on the attitude of the staff on board as much as anything.

There have been quite a few photos of her at Southampton, but these are some of my favourites.

So I’m probably a convert, and from what I’ve seen of her interiors I’d like to cruise in her. Queen’s Grill class, of course…..

Well, everything suddenly came together late this week. The loss adjusters finally got the inspector’s report onto their system and authorised the replacement company to replace all our items, and most stuff duly arrived within 24 hours. We’re waiting for a few more items that weren’t available at immediate notice, but it should all be sorted out by the middle of the coming week. So we have been pretty fully idemnified.

A couple of observations are in order at this point, I think. First, if you’d asked me a month ago to put a value on the various items in my house I wouldn’t have said ‘£8000′; yet adding up the figures on the original receipts, that what it all came to. Secondly, we are wondering what we should do about protecting our property rather better than at present. I’m loath to go down the road of turning my house into Fort Knox, but lots of people have suggested that the fact that we didn’t have a burglar alarm at all on the house was a bit of an invitation – neighbours’ houses with alarms were not burgled that night. The alarm doesn’t even need to do much, just obviously be there. But am I indeed ‘inviting’ burglars by not having obvious protection on my house? Surely, locked doors and windows ought to be enough?

And we are of course hiding things more than we did. Most of the computers that were taken were laid out on a couple of desks in a ‘home office’, for our convenience. In the event this was also very convenient for the burglars, of course – thye just unplugged them and picked them up. In future the laptops will be turned off and put away out of sight. This will be less convenient for us, of course, so are we letting the burglars win? I don’t know, but it’s certainly the case that we have shifted our position towards security and away from convenience. Ah well – such is the world we live in.

Little to report on the burglary, unfortunately.

We reported it to our insurance company on Sunday 11 November, and they immediately appointed a company (“Ival”) to settle the claim. During the following days we had numerous conversations with Ival, produced a list of stolen & damaged items, copy receipts, etc, sent it all to them, and by the following Friday we seemed to be about to reach a settlement. Then suddenly the insurance company decided that they wanted to involve a firm of Loss Adjusters. I didn’t get to talk to them until the following week, of course; it took a few days for them to get details from the insurance company; and in the meantime they decided that Ival had better stop. So everything ground to a halt.

It was decided that a Loss Adjuster ought to come to my house and interview me, but the nearest appointment wasn’t until the 29th. When she came she was busy scribbling on pieces of paper, and told me that her laptop was broken. However at the end of the meeting she said she would recommend settling the claim, but that because her laptop was broken she would have to fax the paperwork to her company. I winced a bit at this thought.

I waited a few days as she suggested, then called her company. No, they had no knowledge of her report. No they didn’t know what was happening to it. A fax? Ah, well, they receive hundred, possibly thousands, of faxes every day; they get attended to in sequence, and the person I was talking to couldn’t say when mine would get transcribed onto their system… if it had been received at all… and she couldn’t check on that… actually, no-one could…. I just had to wait. Grr….

So I wait. It’s been three and a half weeks so far, and I still don’t actually, formally, know where I stand. And of course it’s approaching Christmas and everything will close down until after New Years. Grr….

Actually there was one area of progress. My wife’s jewellery was being dealt with by a different team within Ival, and no-one seems to have told them not to continue. So they appraised the jewellery and then sent us a charge card to be used at a particular jewellers to replace it. When I mentioned this to the loss adjuster who called, she seemed quite surprised; indeed, she didn’t seem to know anything about Ival’s involvement at all.

As I said at the top, the right hand knoweth not….